Learnings from Product Managers

Simplifying Management with Trello

It can be challenging to streamline processes and find the right tools for collaboration

Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. Every board is a project consisting of several tasks displayed in cards. At a glance, Trello tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where an action item is in the process of being completed. It’s a great resource for project management because it visually reflects all the information on the project you’re working on.

Task dependencies are a fact of life in project management. Although an organization may subscribe more or less to an agile workflow, some tasks require others to be completed before they can begin. By using Trello while working on complex projects with large teams, we have realized that we need a way to clearly organize the sets of tasks being assigned to different parts of the organization.

See the big picture

From Trello’s board view, it can be difficult for the user to see the big picture of a project. As a result, we commonly hear complaints about the lack of parent to child relationship management. A clear way to manage the project in terms of Epics, well-known among Jira users, would be an useful addition to Trello.

Let’s take a look at an example: we have Epics, which include UX, Visual Design, Development, and QA efforts. It’s safe to say that tracking them as different Trello cards will be reasonable because estimations and due dates will be different for each discipline. Simple questions like, “What is the current status of the whole feature?” or, ”Can we start work on this task?” tend to lead to time-consuming and frustrating jumps between cards or surfing the Trello board to try and track down the information needed.

We wanted to create a useful and usable solution

By thinking about how we use Trello and how others might use it in a similar way, we have created an extension that allows Trello subscribers to see how cards are related to one another.

This extension enables cards to be tied together by their respective parent/child or dependency relationships. With the dependent card titles and corresponding status visible at the top of the parent task card, users can now see, in a linked outline format, the relationships cards have to one another.

The Parent/Child extension helps keep your Trello board organized. It gives higher level managers an easy way to see activity and status from the top level and drill down to the details ultimately streamlining workflow and processes.